The statements made and opinions expressed in this publication are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Security in Context network, its partner organizations, or its funders.
By Fernando Brancoli
Abstract: As Brazil heads to an October 25 runoff between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, a familiar shorthand has settled over foreign coverage: Brazil is living the United States' recent past on a two-year delay, with Lula cast as Biden and the Bolsonaro family as Trump's return. This essay argues that the comparison explains very little. It places the delayed-mirror story beside its older inverse, the thesis of a "Brazilianization of the world," and shows that both arrange the two countries on a single timeline. Both also leave out the most concrete fact of this cycle, which is that the United States is a participant in the Brazilian election.
Fernando Brancoli is Associate Professor of International Security and Strategic Studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2025–2026). He is a Senior Researcher with Security in Context. His most recent books are Bolsonarismo: The Global Origins and Future of Brazil's Far Right (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and the co-authored The Tropical Silk Road: The Future of China in South America (Stanford University Press, 2022).
Déjà vu?
With the first-round count of the Brazilian election closed and a runoff set for October 25, a reader following the international press was presented with a neatly packaged story. Without knowing much about Brazil, the casual reader could be led to think that they have seen this story before and know where it came from and where it is going. An aging politician of the center-left, who returned to office to hold back the far right, seeks one more term while voters drift toward the family he defeated. A right-wing mob had stormed the seat of government. A movement declared finished after its leader's defeat is back at the gates (CNN 2026a; CNN 2026b).
The shorthand that underlies that narrative is simple. Brazil is the United States with a delay. What happened in Washington between 2020 and 2024 is happening in Brasília between 2022 and 2026, and the reader who remembers how the U.S. sequence ended is invited to guess how the Brazilian one will as well.
I want to argue that this comparison helps very little, and that it helps least the reader it is designed for, the one who follows neither country closely. It offers recognition in place of explanation. It also belongs to a longer approach of placing Brazil and the United States on the same clock, an approach that is sometimes reversed, the idea that the world is being "Brazilianized." And it removes from view the one glaring and well-documented connection between the two countries: the presence of the United States inside the Brazilian vote.
The facts of the election are these. Brazilians vote on a single day for president, governors, the full Chamber of Deputies and part of the Senate. Voting is compulsory, ballots are electronic, and a presidential candidate who falls short of half the valid votes faces the runner-up three weeks later. On Sunday, October 4, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party finished first with 47.03 percent of the valid votes, about 56.1 million, ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with 45.16 percent, about 53.9 million. The remainder was divided among ten other candidates. Pre-election polls had placed Lula in front. The right also advanced below the presidential line: the Liberal Party is positioned to be the largest force in the Chamber, and Michelle Bolsonaro and Carlos Bolsonaro, the former president's wife and another of his sons, won seats in the Senate (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral 2026; Al Jazeera 2026).
The Delayed Mirror and Its Inverse
The script is built with care, and it deserves to be read closely. In May, Chatham House asked whether Lula, after Jair Bolsonaro's years as the "Trump of the Tropics," had become the "Bossa Nova Biden," a heavyweight who won the rescue election and then stayed too long, out of step with voters on the issue that mattered most to them (Sabatini 2026). Bloomberg's opinion pages warned in March that Lula risked "the same mistake as Joe Biden" (Bloomberg Opinion 2026). A year earlier, analysts were already describing a "Biden scenario" of good economic numbers and poor approval (Latinoamérica 21 2025). In August, the political scientist Wendy Hunter told BBC News Brasil that Lula was living "a Biden effect," while noting that compulsory voting makes the Brazilian case different (BBC News Brasil 2026). The template was set in January 2023, when the invasion of Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace was reported across the English-language press as Brazil's January 6 (CNN 2023; Time 2023).
The resemblances are real. Bolsonarismo studied Trumpism, borrowed its vocabulary of fraud, and built personal channels to its operators. The trouble begins when resemblance is promoted to sequence, as if one country were performing a script the other had written.
Consider what the sequence has to ignore. After January 8, Brazilian courts tried and convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro for plotting a coup. He is now serving a sentence of more than twenty-seven years. In the United States, the man at the center of the January 6 attacks returned to the presidency and pardoned those who entered the Capitol (Jacobin 2026; Boston Review 2026; Kettering Foundation 2026). The candidate of the Brazilian right this October is the son of the convicted leader, which makes the contest a dynastic succession conducted from a prison cell, a figure with no U.S. equivalent. He runs in a two-round system with compulsory voting, a national electoral court, and a Congress divided among some twenty parties. The theme that carries his campaign is organized around crime and territorial control by armed groups, a problem with its own Brazilian history (Santos 2026; Brancoli and Poets 2026b) that the U.S. debate on immigration and border control does not illuminate.
The delay itself is unstable. On accountability, a growing U.S. literature now treats Brazil as the country that got there first, and essays with titles such as "What Brazil's January 8 Can Teach Us About January 6" ask Washington to learn from Brasília (Jacobin 2026; Boston Review 2026; Kettering Foundation 2026). How can Brazil be both two years behind and two years ahead?
The Bolsonaro family has itself cultivated this analogy for years, because it carries a promise: if Trump could be defeated, prosecuted and returned, so can they. Reporting since late 2024 has shown the former president and his circle presenting Trump's comeback as the model and the guarantee of their own (Al Jazeera 2024; Bloomberg 2025). Parts of the Brazilian left hold the same image from the other side, as a warning of what follows when a rescue government disappoints. An analogy that both camps deploy in the campaign is a piece of the campaign. Commentators who repeat it as neutral description are quoting one of the parties.
The final consequence of this analogy falls on the Brazilian voter. In the delayed-mirror story, the tens of millions who chose Flávio Bolsonaro on October 4 are explained in advance by what U.S. voters did in 2024. Their reasons, which have to do with fear of armed groups in their neighborhoods, with the price of food, with churches, with a decade of distrust in parties and courts, become side-stories in an imported plot. A reader learns nothing about them, and learns to stop asking.
There is an older version of this story in which the arrow points the other way. Since the 1990s, writers in the North have used Brazil as the name of their own future. Douglas Coupland coined "Brazilification" for the widening gulf between rich and poor. Michael Lind warned of U.S. society hardening into informal castes on the Brazilian model. Ulrich Beck wrote of the "Brazilianization of the West," meaning precarious work, private security, and a state that no longer holds the monopoly of force (Coupland 1991; Lind 1995; Beck 2000). In 2021 Alex Hochuli gave the idea its most ambitious form in "The Brazilianization of the World," where Brazil, the eternal country of the future, becomes the image of a West whose own future has been cancelled (Hochuli 2021).
This way of seeing has a long history in the study of the Global South. Modernization theory placed Latin America at an earlier stage of a road the North had already travelled. The academic literature on democratic transitions graded the region's regimes by their distance from a consolidated model. The anthropologist Johannes Fabian gave the habit a name, the denial of coevalness: the refusal to grant that the people one describes live in the same time as the describer (Fabian 1983). The newer genre that announces the South as the North's tomorrow, whether in Jean and John Comaroff's argument that Euro-America is "evolving toward Africa" or in the Brazilianization essays, reverses the direction of the lesson and often does so with generous intentions (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). It still needs the South to be somewhere else in time. The periphery remains an instrument for the center's self-understanding, consulted for what it reveals about decline in Ohio or precarity in Berlin.
The Brazilian thinkers from whom the Brazilianization thesis borrows were making a different kind of argument. Francisco de Oliveira's critique of dualist reason held that the backward and the modern in Brazil were produced together, each as the condition of the other, inside a world economy that needed both. Roberto Schwarz showed how liberal ideas arrived in a slaveholding society and worked there, out of place and perfectly functional. Paulo Arantes, who gave the phrase "the Brazilian fracture of the world" its critical edge, was describing a relation between center and periphery, a single process seen from its underside (Arantes 2004; Oliveira 2003; Schwarz 1973). In that tradition, the periphery is a position inside a shared system. It is a poor candidate for the role of crystal ball, and an equally poor candidate for the role of late pupil.
Read this way, the features that the mirror stories exchange between the two countries, the private militias, the politicized courts, the evangelical blocs, the contempt for electoral results, stop looking like symptoms that travel by contagion or by schedule. They look like the products of connections: of doctrines, consultants, platforms, weapons, and money that move along identifiable routes (Gomes 2025, 8–11; Viana 2025, 33–36). The question worth asking of any similarity is what carried it.
One Present, Two Capitals
Once one starts following connections, the neat two-year lag dissolves. On some matters Brazil came first. The 2018 campaign that elected Jair Bolsonaro ran on mass messaging through private WhatsApp groups before U.S. strategists had fully reckoned with closed platforms. The use of courts and prosecutors as the main arena of political combat, which started being called lawfare in the U.S., had by then already removed one Brazilian president and jailed another, in an anti-corruption operation that worked in close cooperation with the U.S. Department of Justice. Armed groups with roots in the police have governed neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro for two decades, a form of private sovereignty that U.S. writers reach for when they imagine their own worst case (Brancoli and Poets 2026b; Santos 2026).
On other matters the United States came first, and came in person. The Brazilian coup of 1964 was prepared with Washington's knowledge and backed by a naval task force waiting offshore. The national security doctrine taught to a generation of Brazilian officers was drafted in U.S. war colleges. The war on drugs, with its vocabulary of cartels and its preference for military answers, arrived as policy, training and equipment. The security models that later circulated among Latin American cities, including the pacification programs that Rio exported to its neighbors, moved through consultancies and cooperation agreements in which U.S. agencies were regular partners. Viana’s analysis of these circulating models shows how claims of technical success depend on histories and forms of violence being left out of the comparison (Viana 2025, 33–36).
And on many matters there is no first at all. The conservative conference circuit that brings U.S. and Brazilian politicians to the same stage, the evangelical networks that share pastors, publishers and broadcasting formats, the platforms on which both movements organize, and the market in surveillance and policing technology form common infrastructure. They are used in both countries at once and adapted in each to local ends. Viana’s contribution to the Security in Context report Beyond Militarism traces the experts and markets through which security models circulate, giving this traffic an institutional history rather than treating it as a succession of national stages (Viana 2025, 33–36).
A lag is what this history looks like when it is flattened into two columns. Seen in its own shape, it is a dense traffic in both directions, unequal in power and old enough to have formed the institutions through which each country now argues about the other.
Washington Inside the Brazilian Election
The record is public. In July 2025 the Trump administration announced a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods and tied it explicitly to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, which the White House called a witch hunt. The Treasury sanctioned Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice in charge of the case, and most of his colleagues lost their U.S. visas (openDemocracy 2026; Wikipedia 2026b). These measures were lobbied for in Washington by Eduardo Bolsonaro, who moved to the United States for that purpose and was sentenced in June 2026 by the Supreme Court for coercion in judicial proceedings (Wikipedia 2026a). On May 28, 2026, hours after Flávio Bolsonaro was received at the White House, the State Department announced the designation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho as terrorist organizations, over the stated objection of the Brazilian government. Writing for Security in Context, I argued that the designation brought into Latin America's largest democracy the legal architecture that had underwritten strikes in the Caribbean and the operation in Venezuela (Brancoli 2026). The candidate has since promised that Brazil would join the "Shield of the Americas," Washington's security grouping for aligned governments, and has offered closer cooperation on critical minerals (Axios 2026; Brookings Institution 2026). As Desirée Poets and I have shown, these mineral promises connect the security agenda to disputes over Indigenous land and the power to authorize extraction (Brancoli and Poets 2026a).
The incumbent has answered in the same register. Lula told the United Nations in September that "Brazil is nobody's backyard," and his campaign presents his opponent as the candidate of a foreign president (CNN 2026a; Responsible Statecraft 2026). Asked days before the vote whether he supported Flávio Bolsonaro, Trump said only that he was watching the election "very closely," while his government denied any interference (CNN Brasil 2026).
None of this fits the picture of two national dramas unfolding in parallel, one a little behind the other. The Brazilian far right is in this runoff with instruments that were manufactured abroad at its own request: a tariff, a sanctions list, a terror designation. The delayed-mirror story presents as coincidence of plot what is in fact collaboration among the characters. It also flatters the U.S. reader, who is asked to watch Brazil as a rerun and is spared the question of what his own government is doing in the broadcast. Pedroso’s analysis of Venezuela locates sanctions within a broader regional repertoire of economic coercion, whose effects are entangled with domestic authoritarianism (Pedroso 2025, 21–23).
The traffic runs in both directions. On the day after the first round, Trump praised Brazil's electoral system for delivering results on election night and used it to call U.S. voting "corrupt," one month before the midterm elections (ND Mais 2026). The electronic ballot boxes that Bolsonarismo spent years describing as rigged became, for an afternoon, evidence in a U.S. argument. The two movements are in conversation and use each other as material. That is a relation, and relations are studied by following what moves between the parties.
What the Reader Should Keep in Mind
Three things follow for anyone trying to read the next three weeks.
First, treat every analogy with the United States as a claim that needs a mechanism. When a commentator says that Lula is repeating Biden or that January 8 repeated January 6, the useful response is to ask who learned what from whom, through which channel, and with what local modification. Where there is an answer, there is something to study. Where there is only resemblance, there is a headline.
Second, be equally cautious with the inverse story. The idea that Brazil shows the world its future has the charm of reversing the usual hierarchy, and it keeps the hierarchy's clock. It turns a country of more than 200 million people into an omen for somebody else, and it explains Brazilian violence, inequality and informality as a destination when they are the working parts of an arrangement in which the North has always been present.
Third, look for the United States “inside” the Brazilian election and stop looking for it “beside” the election. The tariffs, the sanctions, the designation of the PCC and the CV, and the promise of a hemispheric security bloc are the material of this campaign. They shape what each candidate can say about crime, about the courts, and about sovereignty (Santos 2026). A reader who has only the mirror will see a familiar plot and expect a familiar ending. A reader who follows these connections will see an election whose terms are being written in two capitals at once, with Brazilian hands at work in both.
On October 25 Brazilians will choose a president. Whatever they decide, the result will be reported abroad as either a confirmation that Brazil followed the U.S. path or a surprise that it did not. Both readings will measure the country against a clock that belongs to someone else. The better question is the one the clock was built to avoid: what the two countries are doing to each other, now, in the same present.
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